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Cudjo Lewis told his story to Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1931 book Barracoon is now being published for the first time

One longstanding feature of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature is the Cheltenham Booker Prize, which picks a year before the real Booker began and decides which novel would have won back then. (Full disclosure: I chair the event.) Last October, the shortlist for 1937 included Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not – but even so, the wholly deserved winner was Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: the stirring and revelatory tale of a black woman trying to live life on her own terms in the American South, and largely succeeding.